Dear Gran: a life in letters
The year I left home we started writing. I think you must have started it. Just a note once a week, a snippet from the paper, nothing much really. But seeing that small envelope with your tiny, increasingly scrawly handwriting was the highlight of my day, whenever it appeared. Sometimes a few cheeky words from Gangee too, slipped in at the end. I used to write back as quickly as I could, just so I could look forward to the next one coming. You’d send me cards with scenes from home: Three Cliffs Bay or Pobbles beach on a stormy afternoon - exactly how we like it, blowing a gale and with no-one else around.
I kept them all, you know. Every time we move house (which has been often in recent years), I seem to find yet another box that hasn’t been unpacked in a while. I’ll spy an unexpected stash of letters and sit for a while, smiling, laughing, crying. Hearing your voice: tales of Kiki’s latest misdemeanour (remember the time she left a present on miserable Mr B’s lawn?!), your struggles with that week’s code word or how you’re in trouble with Mum again for something or other.
They remind me of a different time, what sometimes feels like a different me. It’s not always a time I miss, although I miss you and the letters.
Today, I didn’t find any letters. It’s a quite a while since they stopped arriving on the mat. But I’ve been thinking about whether to write for you for a while now. I’m not really sure where to start.
I’m writing to you now from a street lined with trees that blossom blush pink in the early Spring. From a house of sun-bleached red bricks, its stained glass door peeling with 3 layers of paint and with roses sprawling up one side. I haven’t quite managed the roses round the door we always talked about but there’s always next year. I’ll keep trying: your faint geordie lilt in my head saying ‘gan on ye’. I think you’d like it here, despite the weeds, the encroaching bamboo and air of work in progress.
I’m sitting at our island-cum-dining table-cum-desk, completely lost for words and resorting to our failsafe cup of tea in the hope I might find some. I’ve spent so long debating about whether to write and now I’m here faced with my laptop rather than a pen and paper, I’m not sure what to say. When we wrote before I didn’t plan, I’d say whatever was on my mind as if we were talking in person at the little blue table in your back kitchen.
Reading your letters would make me feel as if I was still there: Radio 2 blaring, you making cheese straws and me trying to get Gangee to teach me the slow fox trot while I stepped on his toes. You trying to rescue one of my baking atrocities. The whole clan squeezed in while you tried to explain for the tenth time how the two of you had ended up on a trip to a nudist beach in Mykonos that summer. I still don’t understand, but god I wish I’d been there to see your face! You passing it off with such aplomb though (”Been there, done that, got the t’shirt”), attempting to be dead pan and unfazed, but with that typical glint in your eye and a wry smile that seemed just for me.
Today, it’s me looking after Kiki. Her main occupation these days is sleeping. Or occasionally failing to chase the cats in our back garden while they sit on top of the fence, where she can neither see nor catch them watching her trotting around and huffing underneath. Mum’s gone to London to see P for a few days. K is off on an adventure to Azerbaijan (yes, I have no idea why either but apparently she likes the grand prix). You have a beautiful great grand-daughter, you know. She has this expression every so often that is all you, and I’m pretty sure I know where she gets her determination from too. I know K has it too but you were the original, and best.
I send you all my love. Try to keep Gangee in check.
E